


Askani's Sons

by rallamajoop



Series: Summers'son [6]
Category: Cable and Deadpool
Genre: Alternate Universe, Horrifying cartoon-chipmunk metaphors, M/M, Time Travel, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-11-29 20:22:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/691060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallamajoop/pseuds/rallamajoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which settling into the <i>4</i>1st century gives Wade his own share of trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This part references some obscure canon surrounding the clan Nate grew up with, first introduced way back in his first solo series from the 90's. In brief, the names you'll want to know are:
> 
> [Jenskot](http://marvel.wikia.com/Aliya_Dayspring_%28Earth-4935%29) (real name Aliya), Cable's canonical first wife, who died in the comics well before we ever meet Cable.  
> [Hope](http://marvel.wikia.com/Hope_%28Earth-4935%29), Jenskot's sister and - confusingly enough - no relation whatsoever to the little redhead Cable adopted more recently. (More info on this whole clusterfuck [here](http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/1946723.html) for the curious.)  
> [Tetherblood](http://marvel.wikia.com/Tetherblood_%28Earth-4935%29) (aka T-Blood) and [Dawnsilk](http://marvel.wikia.com/Dawnsilk_%28Earth-4935%29), who you don't really need to know anything about except that yes, everyone from Cable's era really _does_ choose their code names from bad fantasy novels.
> 
> Like the last part to this series, this is best read as a scene taking place somewhere in Teen!Nate and Wade's near future - after they've got the messy business of admitting all their secrets and getting together well and truly over with, but well before they get themselves too urgently involved in all that messy saving-the-world stuff lurking ahead in Nathan's future.  
>  
> 
>  **Warnings:** There's a lot of discussion of wartime nastiness in this chapter, which probably isn't what most people come into a fluffy highschool AU expecting.

Halfway there Nathan remembers what a profoundly unpleasant experience going through a timewarp has always been before, but by then it's too late to steel himself. The sensation is not unlike having the universe ripped out from under him and drip-fed back through his lower gut in fast motion; for the split-second he spends suspended in transit Nathan would swear he feels the full magnitude of every one of those two thousand years rip by. Maybe it's not so bad for non-sensitives, who lack that ever-present sixth-sense awareness of their surroundings, but Nathan lacks for nothing and those senses have grown in orders of magnitude since he did this last. The result is not pleasant.

He has time to recall having entertained some half-formed idea that focusing on the goal would pull him through the worst of it, but it works no better than it has any other time in the last sleepless week since he'd first tracked the last of Canaanite agents back to their transport. By his own reckoning it's been just over an hour since he arrived on site that morning to found the last argument settled, the Canaanite time machine charging through a squirrel's nest of power converters, and two pre-tuned return devices mounted on wrist straps waiting for him on a folding table. A little over seven hours more since the science team had sent both him and Scott home in the naïve belief he'd sleep better there, while heated logistic debate went on long into the night. Nearly eighteen since they'd concluded that the best case scenario would get what was left of the Canaanite machine working long enough to send one—and _only_ one—more person on the trail of its last timeslide; and that in the wake of more than two full days of trying, retrying and rejecting a dozen different strategies to make it interface with Dr Richards' computers long enough to pull the last destination coordinates out of 'redial memory'. Another eleven hours to debate error margins to the third decimal place when a mistake of half a percent would be all it took to miss the right date by over a decade. Sixty hours and change just to figure out whether the damaged system had succeeded in locking onto its destination coordinates at all at the moment of dematerialisation. (That first was some relief because it had meant not only that the scattered molecules of its last subject mostly likely all arrived in the right century, but that Nathan would be able to dismiss all arguments that he wasn't the one to send in pursuit.) And before that, half a day wasted tracking down the few scientific minds in the country able and willing to repair a badly damaged time machine built using tech they'd never seen before by an unknown enemy from a far distant future, all at the request of a teenaged mutant who remained reluctant to supply nearly so many detailed answers on the subject of _why_ and _how_ than the scientists would have liked.

Suspended in the middle of his own timewarp, for the first time that week's delay doesn't seem so long.

When he'd first realised the last of the Caananite agents was going to get away there'd been a part of him that hadn't cared, and with the machine humming to life despite the showers of sparks erupting from the main console after Nathan's last telekinetic blast, he'd actually hesitated. _Run home and tell them all how much they underestimated me,_ he'd thought. _Run home and tell them all how utterly you **failed**_.He remembers knowing he could make that the last thing through her mind before she vanished—he'd surprised himself with that, if only momentarily, though it hadn't nearly compared to the shock of watching the time machine suddenly retarget itself on him.

He hasn't wasted a single valuable second in all that time worrying over whether he should have seen that tactic coming, or the inescapable irony that after he'd failed to deactivate the timeslide and she'd failed to capture him alive, some of the best minds on the planet have spent a full week trying to repair damage Nathan himself was responsible for in order to recreate what was very nearly his enemy's last act. But 'not one valuable second' sounds rather better before he has to admit how little of the past week he's spent being of any sort of value to anyone, relative to time wasted being dragged outside and out of the way, where he can't do too much damage trying to micromanage what he barely understands.

Objectively he knows that one week is meaningless when there was a journey of millennia ahead of him, but in his heart a week is six days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes too late.

So the first thing Nathan does on arrival is to stumble over his own feet, but the second—long before he has his balance or even a sure idea of which way is up—is to slam up his telekinetic shields on all sides. If the Canaanite machine has sent him home to the heart of its own territory it's important they, not him, are the ones to get the greater surprise. Then and only then does Nathan open his eyes.

He's standing on a barren moor, in half an inch of drying mud. The sky is overcast from horizon to red-tinged horizon where the last (or first) light of the day is barely evident over the next rise, but it would take more than a few shadows to disguise a landscape he knows like this one. This is the no man's land that stretches from his old doorstep across half the country, scorched and cratered under wave after wave of Apocalypse's armies until even the shell fragments have been ground to the consistency of sand, and, as the final insult, when there was no-one left to fight, denied even the poetry of 'the land where nothing shall ever grow again' when clusters of jagged weed began poking their way up through the cracks. Some of them had purple flowers.

There hadn't been flowers when last he was here. A year then, maybe two or three. Long enough for the Caananites to catch on to his attempts to rewrite history, not long enough for them to give up.

He needs to get his bearings, but he's not so far from civilisation at least. Dark against the red-tinged clouds two tall plumes of smoke are rising over the hill, and when he opens his mind in that direction he can feel the minds of a hundred or more, working at cross-purposes far too diverse for any military encampment. That alone is promising. He was _assured_ he'd land close ( _how_ close seemed a thornier matter, but hardly one Nathan was going to argue), so even though he'd be a fool not to extend his mind for a broader sweep in the other direction before setting out, if there's nothing to be found he already has his target.

He's on the very cusp of acting on that thought when a voice behind him, ever so uncertainly, says, "Nate?" and gently pulls his whole world apart.

Not even a minute in hostile territory and there's someone advancing in his blind spot and that's not a mistake many get to make twice but he _knows_ that voice and it can't—it _can't_ be this easy... So many irreconcilable impulses collide in Nathan's head that at first it's all he can do to freeze, gaping stupidly in the wrong direction. It takes a stupendous amount of resolve to make himself turn around.

He's not sure what he's seeing at first. There's a figure coming over a small rise behind him, standing stark against the sky in combat fatigues coloured to vanish into the landscape. He has a mask pulled low over his face and heavy gloves covering his hands; a double bandoleer of grenades and ammunition slung over his shoulder, a rifle hanging loosely under one arm and a handgun holstered on his opposite hip. But for the memory of his name on the figure's lips and the slackness in those fingers on that rifle, Nathan's first instinct would have been to duck for cover.

Confused, Nathan does what he ought to have done first and reaches out to touch whatever consciousness he might find behind the mask.

Two things happen almost simultaneously as he makes contact, so that even as the figure screeches, "Oh my god, _Nate!"_ and launches himself down the slope, Nathan is struck by the most unfathomable sense of _time_ and _distance_ for the second time in minutes.

For the handful of seconds or so it takes for Wade to reach him and tackle him to the ground, the only thing Nathan can think is, _it can't have been that long._

It's all there in the shock of contact. This is _Wade_ , alive and whole and everything Nathan had come here to find, but not the Wade he knows. It's been seven inimitable days since the moment when Wade shoved him out of the way of the retargeting timeslide focus only to fall in his place, but in Wade's mind _a year and a half_ has gone by since he last saw Nate. So even as Wade tackles him to the ground in the hug to end all hugs, screaming his name, Nathan himself is anywhere but present.

The memories Wade's accumulated in all that time without him—they seethe and burn like every half-forgotten nightmare Nathan ever woke from with the bitter taste of someone else's fears intruding on his sleeping mind. The weight alone could crush them both until there was nothing left recognisable; Nathan can't bring himself to look any closer any more than he can make himself unsee that horrible, unrecognisable mass growing like a tumour in Wade's head

They've sent him here too late. Maybe eighteen months is no more than that inevitable error of 0.05% but that's still eighteen months that should never have been at all. He can't be here now, he can't have made it only rescue _this_ Wade. He needs to get back; his return devices are pre-tuned to two thousand years ago, but now they know the date they can send him again; they'll get it right next time-

The thought cuts off as someone elbows Nathan very deliberately in the spleen. Out loud, Wade continues his joyful litany of Nathan's name, but in the link between their minds Nathan hears the words, _if you think about ditching me here while you fuck with my history no-one is ever going to find all the bits I'm going to leave you in!_ expressed with disturbing clarity.

He comes back to what passes for the present to find himself staring into Wade's oddly-coloured face mask. Two large black ovals give him oversized, buglike eyes on a background of dark red fabric—closer to brown really—drawn tight over the face of a Wade who's gone quiet and apprehensive, who'd forgotten he was wearing a mask at all until... _Stupid. Hey Nate, let's have us a touching reunion where you stare into my fashionable new face mask_. Wade grabs a loose fold on the top of his head with one hand and tugs the whole thing off in one smooth movement.

The scars on his face have all changed from what Nathan remembers (they're always in flux but when you see him every day you don't _notice_ ). He looks—older than Nathan remembers if maybe not as much as Nathan had expected. It hits him all of a sudden that he hasn't said a single thing to Wade out loud since he arrived. It's so hard to know where to begin.

"A year and a half," he croaks.

" _I waited for you, you dumb fuck_ ," Wade growls, punching downwards, but it mostly goes into the dirt by Nate's side. It's terribly hard to make out what it is that's making Wade's voice crack, but every part of Nathan from his neck down is convinced it's happiness. He doesn't know how he feels about that.

"Here... alone?" he manages.

Wade's head jerks upwards, startled. "Sheesh, Nate, you practically have a doormat out front of my head, how do you always manage to miss the important stuff?" he says, which means nothing that makes any sense until the other voices reach him.

"Dayspring?" There's the sound of footsteps, trudging through the mud, the owners—definitely plural—approaching with more caution.

Nathan lets his head thump dully back against the ground, sucker-punched with the enormity of the elephant in this plan he'd not even dared consider in more than the most brutally clinical of terms. Just for a moment even Wade seems far away. He's _home_.

"Jenskot," he whispers back, then to Wade, "They found you." A sensation he couldn't begin to put a name to is spreading through his chest, threatening to overwhelm a system already overwhelmed more than once today.

"Kinda fell in their faces if you wanna get technical," says Wade, "Small chrono-multiverse, huh?"

The laugh that startles its way out of Nathan's mouth and moistens his eyes has only little to do with Wade's half-hearted joke. Wade buries his face in Nathan's chest, shoulders shaking.

"Deadpool, you better be sure that's him."

Nathan knows that voice too. Along with Jen, now he remembers to feel for it, _they're all here_. Dawnsilk, Hope, Tetherblood—four presences on the edge of his mind he'd known he'd never feel again.

"Go fuck yourself with your rifle, Hope," says... Deadpool?—tightening his grip on Nathan's midsection. It dawns on him that the uncomfortable pain in his ribs he's been indistinctly aware of for some time is one of Wade's grenades. _Yes, that's a gun in my pocket_ and _I'm happy to see you,_ floats through his mind, and he's not even sure it's Wade's fault. He shakes himself.

"It's okay," he calls to Hope, raising his hands. "It's me."

Hope's face appears over Wade's shoulder. The muzzle of her gun does too. "Nothing personal, Dayspring, but if that's true you'll understand why I'm going to need a second opinion. Deadpool, I don't even wanna hear it. You and your boyfriend can finish your reunion indoors. This mission is over, people. Pack up, we're going home."

"Mission?" Nathan sits up as fast as Wade's weight will let him. The shapes of the other three fanned out in formation are expected enough that the gut-wrench of seeing them is more of a nudge, this time. Catching up can wait. "I can-"

"What you can do, Dayspring, is shut your mouth and practice some of what you always preached about orders from above," barks Hope. "Your intel is two years out of date and even if you've still got your edge, my team just lost their focus and I have exactly no time available to bring you up to speed. This isn't our last window for this job. It'll wait. _You_ won't."

It's a good call and it doesn't leave much room for argument, so if there's a part of him that bristles at the thought that this is the welcome he gets from one of his own soldiers, it's worth remembering that he'd left her in charge for a reason, and this sort of willingness to yell in the face of a former captain at a moment's notice is no small part.

"Understood," he says, disentangles himself from Wade and gets to his feet. Wade seethes quietly in Hope's general direction with an intensity that speaks of months of practice as he dusts himself off and swipes a sleeve over his eyes. Nathan catches Jenskot flicking her eyes up to meet his own with a look that could be sympathy but is more likely light years more complicated, and not for the first time Nathan finds he doesn't care to know the details.

_It's all different now_ , he thinks. _I could tear them all to shreds in the space of a thought_ , but there's something unsubstantial in his understanding of that that won't settle easily in his mind. At least now he's here the imagery from the worst of his mutant-adolescent nightmares seems a long way detached from reality; rendered no more plausible than it would have been in days before he'd had enough power to be dangerous should he ever lose control.

As usual, it seems all he needed to put his worst subconscious fears to rest was to face them in the light of day. Probably doesn't hurt that he's go so many more immediate things to worry about either.

* * *

They fill him in in bits and snatches on the way back. The clan had learned the Canaanites were sending agents back in time to sabotage Nathan's mission long before the plan was put into motion; unfortunately they'd arrived slightly too late to stop it happening. Undeterred, they'd been just wrapping up the job of making sure the enemy wouldn't get the chance to send any more agents after him when Wade materialised out of the blue, more-or-less right on target and bringing with him a crazy tale that Clan Chosen were in the unlikely position of having every reason to believe. Wade had found himself far from home but in unexpectedly welcoming company, excepting only the fact that his new friends had just finished destroying his only way home.

They'd done their best to find him another working time device, but the last eighteen months had been something of a rocky period.

Nathan listens and asks as few questions as he can bear, all the while a third of his consciousness occupies itself remembering what it's like to live on a constant low-level alert for danger. Another third finds itself forever getting distracted by the strange ease of the stooping gait Wade affects in front of him, shadowing his way through the trench ahead; the effect only intermittently broken when Nathan catches what might have been someone else entirely glancing back at him over Wade's shoulder, making sure he's still there.

The old bunker looks newer than he'd remembered it somehow, or newer than he'd expected to find it, perhaps. He's not sure what to make of that.

They give him a seat in the ready room, where he watches as Hope puts Jenskot and Dawnsilk on guard and takes T-Blood with her on escort duty. When she gets to Wade, standing there with his arms folded across his chest and a look that dares anyone to take him on at a staring context, she doesn't get further than his callsign before obviously giving the order up as waste of effort.

"If you've moved from that spot by the time I get back," she tells him, "Dayspring is going to be the least of your worries," and is halfway out of the room before Wade finishes saying, "Yes, sir-ma'am, this here two feet 'o floor ain't going anywhere on my watch or my name's not Edward Wong Hau Pepulu Tivruskii the Fourth of the Good Ship Bebop, _sir!_ " with the world's worst salute.

Jenskot catches Nathan's eye again and almost gets as far as exchanging a smile before she remembers herself.

There's nothing to do but wait, but the wait isn't long before Hope and T-Blood are back, between them escorting two women and a man, all dressed in the soft brown robes of the Askani sisterhood. One by one, they step forward to press their fingers to Nathan's temples and reach deep into his mind, sifting through layer upon layer of memory and intent. The instinct to resist the intrusion takes no small effort to suppress, though judging by the gentle wear of age on the faces of two of these three, it might be even odds whether his own talent, even including all the exceptional growth since he last encountered the Askani face to face, would mean much against the years of practice these acolytes could boast between them. Gentle as the acolytes are, the sensation of being made so open to near strangers is new to him and far from pleasant. Any distraction would have been welcome, but what his eyes inevitably fall on whenever one of the acolytes lean more than a little to the right is the rare glimpse of Wade over their other shoulder, legs pulled up on a bench at the side of the room, all his attention on the task of disassembling and cleaning his rifle in a series of sharp, vicious movements. Were a greater part of Nathan's thoughts at his own disposal, he's sure he would have made more of why that image unsettled him so.

At last the Askani conclude their examination and reach a consensus within a glance. One by one, they step forward to embrace him in welcome. Throughout the room the low buzz of tension finally dissipates with the sound of a couple of whistles of relief. Someone thumps him lightly on the arm, and he looks around to see Jenskot giving him a wry smile.

"So you done with him?" says Wade. He still hasn't once looked up from his rifle but he's got it reassembled and he's sighting down through the scope in a manner that for some reason is making Nathan remember the time Wade had explained the origin of the term 'shotgun wedding'.

"Verdict reached, DP," says T-Blood, with his usual long-suffering patience. "He passes."

"Great." Wade slaps down his rifle with an audible bang, vaults off his bench and grabs Nathan's hand, almost like an afterthought on his way to the door. "'Scuse me, coming through, me and my boyfriend gotta go _reconnect_ for a while, don't wait up for us."

He drags Nathan down the hall, around a corner and through the doorway to... Nathan blinks in confusion.

"The holding cell?" The answer clicks almost before he's finished asking, but by then Wade is already explaining.

"That thing where you guys all bunk in one room is real cute—like a big slumber party that never ends— _until_ you find yourself needing some old-fashioned privacy," says Wade. "That and a mattress and good thick walls." He shoves Nathan down onto the cot and crawls into his lap; altogether it's almost distracting enough to keep him from processing a niggling feeling that there's something in Wade's priorities that he should be objecting to.

"Wade, this is-" he tries, noticing somewhat obliquely that he must have missed the point where Wade had rid himself of his weapons' harness. Also his boots.

"Stop right there, mister," Wade growls. "For once in your life, Nate, can't you just shut up and fuck me already?"

"I'm serious," says Nathan.

" _I'm_ serious! If I stop to tell you all the different ways I'm serious we are never going to get to do anything!" Wade is certainly serious about what he's doing with the button on Nathan's fly.

"Wade-" Nathan isn't sure what he's even objecting to anymore, just that it's very important.

"You wanna hear about the best part of getting to hang with your homies here on planet grimdark-futureland?" Wade grabs both sides of Nathan's fly and yanks them open, flinging his arms wide on the end of the motion. "I finally get where the hell you were coming from all this time! Like, back home, when they teach you about _sex_ it's this whole song and dance routine about how if you ever do it you'll go blind and god kills a kitten and some poor kid in Africa will be starving to death and it _will be all your fault_. Then everyone you know and love with get pregnant with syphilis."

"Er," Nathan says eloquently. This is quite possible the wrong moment to realise that the most concise and honest way to describe what it does to him when Wade gets like this involves the words 'turned on'.

"But the Askani," Wade goes on, yanking Nathan's shirt out of his pants, "when they do sex ed, _damn_ , once they're done with the 'safety tips with Sister Wotsabra hour' and the '101 handy ways to make the experience more enjoyable for everyone involved full-sense-video and kleenex package', that's when they get to sharing the _really_ kinky stuff. Like how if you're not sure which way you swing, you should try it with lots of different people until you figure it out! Or how sex isn't just _sex_ , Nate, 'cause sex may be dandy for _reproduction_ ," ten fingers arrive on the bared skin above Nathan's waistband and begin running their way up under his shirt, "or for _couple-bonding_ , or even just for _fun_ ," over his ribs now, and Wade's body keeps up by arching down from his thighs, "but people underestimate how perfect sex can be for working through stress, or dealing with _tension_." Nathan's shirt may still be mostly in place but Wade's hands have reached the nape of his neck and his face is in Nathan's, they're pressed together to the chest and it's momentarily very hard to interpret what kind of tension Wade's talking about.

"Soon as we're done here, you and me can shoot the shit for hours," says Wade. "Dig out the rocket launcher and throw that shit into orbit, _oh baby_. But first, I have had to sit for an hour in the same room as my boyfriend who I haven't seen in eighteen months and I might be suffering from a little bit of _tension_ that needs seeing to first."

Nathan swallows. "I... see your point."

Wade's not psychic, on the scale of telepathic talent he'd barely draw equal to an unfitted tinfoil hat. But he's not nearly as stupid as most people think and he's been in a relationship with someone who _is_ telepathic long enough to have figured out some disturbingly effective tricks for selectively guiding what Nate does or doesn't see, and a year or more being put through regular meditation drills and military discipline wouldn't have provided much opportunity for those to get to get rusty. This is why it's not a complete surprise to find Wade looking him right in the eye not a moment before Nathan is hit in the forehead with an absolutely devastating sensation of _need_.

"And since we're on the subject, Nate," says Wade from somewhere, "it might have been a whole week since you last saw me but it's been a year and a half since I last saw you, so I just need to make it very clear that today's session is _all. about. me._ Got it?"

"Yessir," says Nathan quickly.

Wade screws up his face. "Ugh, don't _do_ that, okay? I've been sir-ing Her Shouty McLeaderness so long it's turned into the least sexy thing ever."

Nathan grimaces back. "Sorry, I..." he loses that train of thought to Wade's next insistent grind. "Tell me you brought lubricant, at least."

Wade waves a hand towards the far wall. "Should be some in the crate somewhere," he says, raising a whole list of questions that may be better left unanswered. " _You_ get it."

"While you're doing _that?_ " Nathan is an excellent telekinetic, but he has only so much concentration and Wade is doing his utmost to monopolise all of it.

"I am dead serious when I say I'd take you dry right now," says Wade. "Your problem."

It's a good thing the lube isn't in a glass container, given how many times Nathan drops it before it makes the distance. Wade makes Nate open him up with telekinetic fingers that skitter over and under a body that won't stop moving no matter how much trouble it gives them both. Wade sinks down onto him far too fast, and then and _only_ then will he let Nathan touch him with his real hands; reach up to hold onto him as they battle to find a rhythm they can both stand. All Wade's scars have moved since Nathan touched him last, he's going to have to learn them all from scratch, they've been apart for so _long_.

It's not the best sex they've ever had by any stretch of the imagination; Wade's almost so desperate he doesn't _care_ about that sort of detail, but it builds so long and so frantic that Nathan hardly picks the moment they start to come until it's all long over and neither of them know yet if they'll ever get their breath back. But they do, or they don't but it doesn't matter because Wade has slumped his full weight down on Nathan chest and turned his head up to kiss him at last, and that's what they do until whatever breath they had is gone again.

With the edge taken off—or at least worn to a more serviceable bluntness—the second round is _much_ better.

* * *

The best part, though, is what comes after, the both of them pleasantly worn out and wrapped so tightly in each other's space that it would take some effort to sort out exactly who's lying on who's arm, in the little room available on the holding cell cot built for one (1) prisoner of not too much over average weight. The light from the dying bulb in the far corner recess casts a dull orange glow over the bed—swan-song of a component at the very end of a long chain of hand-me-downs from more vital parts of the bunker—that traces long shadows from every irregularity in Wade's skin. The occasional drip of water leaking in through the roof somewhere is the only sound beyond the whisper of their breath gradually slowing back to normal pace. Nathan drifts for a while, content, coasting on the restful edge of sleep—but never so far beyond that he's not ready to respond when Wade inevitably starts to stir at his side, tightening his arms around Nathan's chest until it's just this side of painful.

"I knew you'd come back for me," he says, muffled by the angle. "I knew you would."

Nathan runs his fingers over the back of Wade's head (all those ridges and depressions still so unfamiliar to the touch). "Was there ever any doubt?" He doesn't ask Wade if he's crying.

" _Duh_ yes there was," Wade grouches. "A year and a fucking half—you don't _write_ you don't _call_ ; that's a lotta lonely nights in some shithole with nothing to think about 'cept how you been there so long you don't hardly remember which way's up anymore. May as well ask if I ever doubted there really are eleven secret herbs and spices or enough abdominisers left in the warehouse for everyone who's gonna call in the next five minutes or a secret base in Rockwell where the real proof that JFK was shot by the first man on the moon is locked in a box somewhere."

"I can see the experience has changed you completely," says Nathan mildly, though when Wade tenses up against him he couldn't have honestly said it wasn't the reaction he was aiming for.

"What, you mean aside from the bit where I finally get how you made it to high school without seeing a single episode of Fresh Prince of Bell Air?" On Wade's lips it's not a comment, not a dare; it's an ultimatum, and for all that Nathan's remark hadbeen more a test than a joke, he may have gone too far.

"Wade, I," he starts, stops, starts again. "There's no way I—"

"If you finish that apology I am going to rip out your throat and nail it to your face with my teeth," Wade snaps, ripping his arm out from under Nathan's body so fast the friction burns. He pinches two fingers in the loose skin between Nathan's collarbones. "I can do that, so's you know, since I had the golden opportunity to find out they _grow back._ "

"Wade..." Nathan is starting to remember why he'd wanted to have this conversation _before_ wearing himself out with two rounds of enthusiastic reunion sex.

"Oh, save it, I had my share of reminders how I don't belong here from your Chosen-pals." Wade flops over on to his other side with a casual ease that belies the inescapable way he's left Nathan facing his back. "Funny story, seems like none of them got what a cushy assignment you were getting out of your back-to-the-future thing until I showed up here. There's me all lost and wide-eye and practically shitting myself before they even got their guns lined up. Great people, but it's nice having back up when you have to meet the family, not to mention being expected to cough up some kinda explanation for what a nobody like _you_ was doing alone with their Nathan in a dark enemy base in the middle of the night. Little hard to feel the warmth and sincerity of the 'don't worry Wilson we'll find a way to send you home'-routine when you're picking up all these subtle hints none of them really believe you'll live that long and no-one's hiding how they really feel about having another mouth to feed on a guy who can't pull his own weight. Whadya know, turns out they don't so much go in for that Constable Care 'don't go trying to be a hero' bull this far up the arse-end of time when your average soldier isn't old enough to drive."

Nathan squeezes his eyes shut. "It's a coping mechanism," he says, the words coming out on automatic. "It's not personal. You don't get attached to anyone until you know they can handle themselves well enough to survive."

"Ya think?" The glare Wade throws over his shoulder is vicious. "I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it doesn't usually come with subtext that spells out, _if he can't do that he was never good enough for our Nate to begin with!_ Should we talk about _that_ for a bit and save you digging it out of my skull later?"

Nathan doesn't have the first idea what to say, still hasn't figured it out several seconds later when Wade takes pity on him and ducks his head away again. "Don't get me wrong, they were basically right, but that don't mean it didn't hurt," he says, which really doesn't help.

"But you did," Nathan offers weakly. "Survive."

"Yeah," says Wade, with an equally weak laugh. "I'm pretty hard to kill."

That sentence and all it implies hangs there in the silence between them for slightly too long before Nathan can't bear it.

"How did you find out?" he asks, needing the answer more than he wants it.

Wade flops onto his stomach and folds his arms under his chin, eyes focused on nothing in particular. "Did you know the Forskye cell? Base on the east side of the reconstruction zone."

"Not very well." Nathan has the premonition he's about to be glad of this.

"Couple weeks after I landed word came in they had intel on this extra time portal the bad guys were putting together and would we like to join them for a romantic joint assault," says Wade. "Was going real smooth up until we found out what they really had was a mole who'd invited some extra guests around to throw a surprise party for the rest of us. Shit went down, lasers going everywhere, bits o' ceiling getting intimate with the floor right there in front of everyone, and I realised this was the perfect moment to show off my badass new gun skills by having a freakout over who I was meant to be aiming at and scampering for the nearest hole like a guy trying to bond with his inner cockroach. The mole nabbed me in the doorway and put a gun to my head and I don't really remember how the next bit went 'cept that it ended with me looking down at this gaping hole through my gut and realising this was the proverbial, and all I had left was the wait for the part where I blacked out and didn't wake up again. Instead I just sorta lay there watching the mole gun down a couple more of his old pals and pass out from blood loss, me wondering how the heck his lungs got the message before mine did."

Somewhere in the cell, another droplet of water hits the floor with a faint splash. "Never really occurred to me before then that 'healing factor' meant 'you will be able to regrow your own spleen'," Wade comments. "So there's that."

The room around them seems suddenly much colder. "How long did it take?" Nathan asks.

Wade shrugs. "Can tell you how long it felt like."

Nathan is reaching for Wade before he knows he's doing it, before he has any idea why. The sense memory of those new scars winding their way over Wade's stomach is there in his fingertips; there'd been nothing to testify to a gut wound, but then, if Wade's healing factor truly is up to the task of bringing him back from mortal injury, there's no reason why there should be. The texture of the skin over Wade's spine in the present offers no new insight. "How much does it hurt?"

The steady beat of dripping water has gotten faster, Nathan notices, in the space before Wade replies. It must be raining again outside.

"The second time it happened," Wade says, "I woke up at the bottom of a crater without a clue what I was doing there, surrounded by so many bits of people I spent a couple minutes panicking over this mangled arm before I realised it wasn't even mine. Didn't know whether I was supposed to run left or weave right or how many feet I even had anymore. I probably would've just sat there in my hole and worked on my stunned cadaver impression if I hadn't seen that kid standing there. Like, you know those cartoons where a whole side of a house comes down but the hero's standing in the doorway and his little dog's under the window so they both come out without a scratch? Musta happened like that, just with explosives and shrapnel instead of the laugh track. And there's plasma flying everywhere and rockets going boom-boom-boom and this little kid's just standing there staring into this pile of rubble that used to be his house and I dunno, it hit me that I can't just sit there. So I scrambled over, got an arm around him and dragged him down behind some cover, but you gotta understand the only cover left is what you get where the rubble goes up a little higher in places and fuck, this place we were standing in was the kid's house five minutes ago, what good did that do for cover? We'd hardly hit paydirt back there before our cover gets caught in the DI-radius of an A-matter grenade, and lemme tell you, _nothing_ finds you your feet faster than watching half a ton of rock vaporise like a cartoon coyote after three seconds under a tail jet—and that's counting the double take to come back and grab the kid."

Wade sneaks a look at Nate from under his arm. "You may be picking up on a bit of a metaphorical theme running along here, what with the man and his dog followed by the roadrunner feature, and you'd be right, but the Big A and his pals had a few clips left on the Merry Melodies reel left to go, because coming right up was the side-splitting escapades of Monsieur Squirrel and his favourite acorn on the first day of squirrel season. He loves that acorn, does Mr Squirrel. That baby's bigger than his own ego and he's wiled away whole mornings polishing it until it gleams like a funhouse mirror. But this is just scene-setting stuff; the real fun begins when squirrel season kicks off with a bang and before you can say 'holy tortured analogy batman!' every squirrel in town has scampered save our little friend who can't bear to part with a nut that weighs as much as he does."

Wade takes a breath, and Nathan, freed momentarily from the uphill struggle of keeping up, begins to worry that this metaphor is getting away from both of them. "I'm gonna let you in on a little insider tip about our hero," Wade goes on, after a pause just a little too short for Nathan to make up his mind whether he wants to interject, "if it was just him out there he might've lain hisself down and let those nasty guns have their way with him, but who's gonna take care of his acorn if he doesn't make it? He's getting out of there with his 'corn or on it but those hunters aren't making it easy for him. He hides himself behind a bit of branchy stump, _kapow,_ not anymore he ain't! He scampers one way, _boom,_ there goes the rest of that branch and the fluff off the end of his nose to boot! He scurries back the other, _bang_ , there goes the other side! Now this being a cartoon where gravity is a state of mind it takes our hero a couple more double-takes to put two ends of a branch together and figure out there's nothing holding him up anymore, but when he does you can bet no amount of aerial breast stroke is gonna keep him up for long. His branch goes into freefall, the ground is closing in, he makes his desperate leap of faith and is saved by a miracle, he lands on something soft! He's just got time to thank his lucky stars before his saviour starts to growl and sprout teeth aaaand he's off again, clutching his lucky acorn like he's been struck down with lockjaw." Wade makes a noise that sounds, with some imagination, maybe just a little like a laugh. "I mean, tie me in razor wire and call me an IED, Nate, when you were telling me about the excitement back home you sold the A-Boys short on their _side-splitting_ comic timing."

Nathan badly wants to stop him. This is getting beyond Wade's habit of taking refuge in absurdity; there are words for what he's doing, none of which Nathan much likes. But if he tells Wade that much—that he thinks he knows this story ends—Wade might never tell it to anyone. Whatever it is Wade needs from him in this moment, that isn't it.

"You'll be getting the rhythm to this tune by now," says Wade, waving his other hand for emphasis so that it bobs in and out of Nathan's vision behind his down-turned head, "so I'll skip some of the play-by-play and cut to the big finale where our hero finally sees the light at the end of the tunnel. All he needs is one last mad dash but the hunters are closing in, there's an ACME squirrel-homing bullet on his tail and the little guy's looking a little the worse for wear if you get my drift. The orchestra climaxes, Mr Squirrel summons the last of his juice and he hurls that acorn home into the bunker and hits the dirt face-first. Our Mr Squirrel's a savvy little critter and he knows how the rules work for cutesy squirrels in cartoon comedy land. They could fire that next bullet right in his face and the worst he'd take home would be a black eye, a stylish new coat of soot and a cheap gunpowder-hangover. But his acorn ain't on his medical plan and that makes it fair game, so if only one of them can make it to the bunker in time then by all the nuts in Switzerland he's going to hurl that acorn home and collapse face down into the dirt knowing there's no bigger damn hero in this whole damn forest than Squirrel McHardnuts.

"That's our tableau when the bullet hits paydirt with a badda-boom so big the whole screen fills with smoke, leaving our audience a little time to contemplate how lucky it is the acorn was safely stowed away in its bomb-proof hidey-hole when that went down. Smoke starts to clear and the first thing to pop into view is our hero, hardly singed and just as surprised as we are to find he's still conscious. What a stroke of luck, when he hit the deck the bullet must've gone clean over his head! He's in the middle of punching the air with a celebratory fist when the last of the smoke wafts away.

"So it turns out," says Wade, in a voice just barely, maybe, starting to break, "they don't make bomb shelters like they used to. There's nothing left of his precious nut but a curl of popcorn, its puffy white guts turned inside out and spread into a flower for all the world to see. You wanna know how much it hurts lying around waiting for my intestines to grow back?" This last comes out with so little change in tone that Nathan takes a second to catch up. "Here's your answer: not half so much as _that_ did."

A vicious downward shove on Wade's last statement sets the bedsprings creaking with a motion that gradually fades as Nathan digests the myriad things Wade has and hasn't said about what that day cost him. The insubstantial contact of a hand on Wade's back seems to mean very little, all of a sudden.

"I wish I'd been there," he says, because he has been; each and every one of Clan Chosen has been, and more than once—but he wasn't there for Wade.

" _Why?_ " The vehemence of Wade's tone comes out of nowhere. "So you could watch me go through that? So you could roll in your messianic arse and save the rest of us poor suckers? Whisk me home before I became today's moral lesson about the futility of giving a shit?" Wade shoves himself up off the bed on his hands. "You gonna look me in the eye and tell me I didn't deserve to go through that, Nate?"

" _Yes!“_ Nathan hisses. "What do you think we were fighting _for?!_ " He knows survivor's guilt when he sees it; if Wade is going to argue this he has a dozen arguments ready on the tip of his tongue. What he's not prepared for is for Wade's answer to be to stare at him with an unreadable expression for several seconds before settling back to rest his chin on his arms again.

"Jenskot was the one who found me after, you wanna hear what she said?" he says.

Nathan rolls over onto his back and tries very hard to give Wade the opportunity to get to whatever point he's heading for. "Did it start with 'get up' or 'you still breathing?'"

"Well. Second one technically, so naturally I told her to fuck off and let me die in my ditch in peace. What she said _then_ was that they'd had a pool going on how long I was going to live—I know, I know, nothing personal, gallows humour or whatever you wanna tag it under—but they'd had to call it quits with no winner because no-one bet I'd make it this long. I said, sure, great, should've saved yourselves time and called it off as soon as you found out I had the cheat code for infinite respawns. She said, that _was_ after we knew about the healing factor, now are you getting up out of that ditch on your own or do I gotta carry your arse home?"

Nathan presses his fingers over his eyes. "How long ago did you say this was?"

"Couple months after I got here, give or take," says Wade, vaguely. "Was nice of her to say and all, but it would've been a whole lot nicer if that got to be the _moment_ , y'know, where it all turned around for me instead of just an undistinguished middle of my long career of falling face down in my own shit. You know all that stuff they tell you back home about how video games will rot your brain?"

"Um." That doesn't... wait, no, he does remember Wade mentioning something along those lines passing, once or twice. "Is it going to matter if-"

"Well you're talking to the living proof it's all true," says Wade, apparently uninvested in whether Nathan does or not. "I am the _original_ Major Fugbert 'Danger' Melonsmuggler, Space Marine, the one _pee-see_ in a battlefield of one-hitpoint-wonders lovingly modelled to make you _believe_ the human body contains 10 pints of blood but the first 9.8 don't count if we go into overtime. Your team, their team, doesn't hardly make a difference when the only function your guys seem to have down is to make you feel guilty when you scrape through a level without half as many left as you started with. I go out there every day with a pause-screen inventory chock full of health potions and more hit points than god, and the day someone gets in a lucky shot is the day I wake up to a giant floating message that reads, _Continue? Y_ / _Y_ / _MF-ing-Y.“_

With an uncomfortable sinking feeling, Nathan allows that Wade's metaphor is starting to make a disturbing amount of sense.

"But the worst part of what those games will do to you," Wade goes on, a bitterness to his voice that has always before been reserved for his views on being lied to by mind-readers or comments about his looks, "is they give you this idea you can get away with making _mistakes_. I've fucked up more times than a kid with the idea that drowning all his Sims is how you win. What's it matter if you're holding your controller upside down and some zombie just spilled your guts all over the floor when all you gotta do is hit the reset button and it's over? You don't have to win. All you gotta do is finish the game, and you can turn off the TV and put your wii-mote back on the hook and _go home_ to your dog-eaten maths homework and your domestics over who's supposed to pick up fresh milk, two-point-five square meals plus all the toothpaste you can eat and twenty-five channels of news-sport-weather-and-bias and your crazy delusion it matters what _anyone_ in the universe thinks about your face. The truththat's been sitting there waiting for you this whole time is that none of this shit is even real. None of it would exist if it wasn't for you and your fucktard inability to keep your five finger discount away from the R-rated game shelf. And _maybe_ for the sake of dramatic tension the day you finally realise all that might just happen to be the same day you get the sudden sense of deja-vu when it hits you that the severed arm that just landed on your face is wearing your watch, and there's nothing to do but dissolve into a gibbering heap or pick it up by the elbow and beat some guy halfway to death while you yell at him about how this is the _second time this week_ and does he have any _dickmunching_ idea how many hours it takes to grow one of those back?"

The look on Nathan's face must be something fairly horrifying by this stage, because Wade actually hesitates when next he glances over. "Uh. Too much information?"

"No!" Nathan says quickly. If Wade has anysort of need to get this out the last thing he needs to worry about is imposing Nathan's squeamishness, of all people's. "No, it's just—go on."

Wade shrugs. "Moral of the story is when you've got the complete trading set of epic fuck-ups with doubles to spare there's not much left to do but get something right for a change, and if it doesn't go your way first time well, even the guy with the head full of lead has to start learning from his mistakes eventually, right? And when he finally gets it, in the middle of shoving his own severed armpit down some fucker's throat, it's so _fucking_ simple you could print it on a greeting card. All he ever had to learn how to do was go out there, look his next screw up right in the eye and not give a shit."

"That's.... a novel take on the subject," says Nathan, a little worried he's not following, and more than a little worried he _is_.

"Will you shut it for two minutes, I'm trying to share my big philosophical epiphany here! What I was _saying_ is that everyone else—your regular guys like Jenskot and T-Blood and Dawny and everyone else whose bits don't grow back when they come off—they're the ones who don't deserve this shit. But me, I was _born_ for this. 'Cause here's the other thing I found out when I got over that dumb idea that I was just some pampered city kid way out of his depth: I'm _good_ at this. I don't get tired. Bullets hardly slow me down. I'm what you might go so far as to call a natural, which don't mean jack if you weren't born lucky, but lucky me when _I_ fuck up I get a second try."

Nathan has barely started to digest all this when Wade drops his head and adds, "Plus I have this attitude problem where getting shot at all the time really gets my goat, and maybe some issues about getting picked on that don't translate so well to being asked to sit and watch when someone starts firing at me and my buds," and then, with disturbing timing, elbows Nate sharply in the side. "Hey you, quit getting your guilt on and lemme finish already! Last eighteen months of my life have sucked beyond the centre of a thousand tootsie pops and I'm not sorry for a second of it, okay? I mean it, boyfriend. I was built for this gig. I can kick like a bottle of 50-proof and bite like a tsetse fly and survive like an Elvis conspiracy theory and _shoot_ like a mother without a single quarter left for the swear-jar. And when we get back home—I can help you!"

"Help...?" Nathan has no idea where this part comes from, but Wade, it seems, is reading paragraphs of meaning into his confusion.

"Nate, they _told_ me, okay? The real reason they sent you back."

It says perhaps a little too much about the degree Nathan has internalised the half-truth he's been living under ever since arriving in the 21st century that it takes him a moment to remember what Wade is talking about. " _Oh_." He should say more, but comprehension when it finally hits is like being tossed into a vacuum; there's no air left in his lungs to answer _with_.

"Not that I blame you for keeping a lid on the whole 'come with me if you wanna live,' part," Wade says. "You kinda gotta see this place yourself to _get_ it. Well I _get_ it now. I've gotten it so hard I'm gonna be picking bits of it out of my lower gut this time next year."

"You're the first to know," Nathan admits. "Even Scott doesn't know the details."

Wade snorts into the pillow. "Nice call. I'm picturing your Dad taking it _real well_ when he finds out the Askani clan busted half their resources for seventeen years fixing your arse for more than the pleasure of sending you home to play happy families. You might wanna wait until you're set to move out before you drop that one in his lap. But maybe he'll take it better now you're not gonna be taking on two million tons of predestination alone."

From the one side, Wade had cut to the heart of that matter with terrifying efficiency; from the other, Nathan is positive he's criminally underestimating just how much his father has likely half-guessed for himself long ago—and if not, then certainly since the awkward conversation a week ago when Nathan had been forced to explain, however briefly, exactly _how_ his boyfriend had come to be lost in the far future. None of which mattered one whit in the face of the crux of what Wade was telling him

"You want to—to _help._ Wade, this isn't something for you to decide on out-"

"'s not _your_ decision either, in case you weren't paying attention. This isn't some _whim_ that I hit on, _Nate_. I'm not proposing this like it's gonna be a _bonding exercise._ It might be your future you're saving but it's _my_ world those fuckers are gonna steamroll through seven levels of hell, and I had a lotta time in this fuckhole to think real hard about how that makes me feel. This ain't about you, Nate, this is personal. You let me help with your big battle plan or you get to watch me make my own."

Nathan sits up, stiffly, as far he can with the mattress sagging under the redistributed weight, uncomfortably aware this is not a conversation he wants to be having in bed. "Wade. Do you understand what exactly is at stake here?"

"Uh-huh. We find Apocalypse before he gets his teeth in the pie, smash him to bits, then we _watch_ all the bits like the hawk-eyes bastards we are and play whack-a-mole with anything that tries to move. If not us then who? You're like, _Akira,_ and I don't die."

"You make it sound so simple." This is so much more than Nathan can be expected to process right now. He needs space and time—alone, without the perpetual motion machine of Wade's interjections to distract him. He's also exhausted and the thought of leaving Wade's side for a moment is unthinkable. He woke up this morning primed for battle and arrived to find the battle won and the politicians betting the tribute on the fine print. He's missed what are very probably the most important eighteen months Wade will ever live, and twenty minutes of post-coital soul-baring cannot even begin to be enough to catch him up.

"You don't believe I'm up to this?" says Wade. "Tomorrow morning you and me are going to have ourselves a match. You can rethink whether I get to help you or not after I kick your arse. Or, y'know, I could just break out the emotional blackmail over how it's your fault I went through all this. Whatever works for you."

Nathan gives in. "I don't expect that'll be necessary. But... understand that this is going to take a while to get used to."

"S'okay," says Wade, "You'll have time. _I'll_ be busy getting used to having seventy different cable channels at my beck and call again. Man, I even missed Fox News. I even missed the scrolling text bar that ticks along the bottom of Fox News How fucked up is that?"

And just like that, all that tension is gone again, Wade is Wade, and none of this actually needs to be settled tonight—and at the back of Nathan's mind is the terrifying possibility that, just maybe, everything is going to be all right. Why fight it?

Nathan lets himself smile. "You waited for me eighteen months and that was what you missed?"

"Never said it was the _only_ thing I missed," says Wade, then to Nathan's surprise, he goes quiet in a way that means there's an uncomfortable secret about to surface in his thoughts where Nathan is going to see, and Wade's building up the guts to spill it on his own terms before that happens. "Er. You know. You _were_ awaya really long time, and, uh..."

"Uh...?"

"I slept with T-Blood!" Wade blurts, the words erupting in a high-speed blur. "A couple times. Eighteen months is a really long time with only your hand for company and I had no idea when you were gonna show up!"

Nathan stares blankly back at him, which is undoubtedly the wrong reaction, but honestly, Wade has faced death, probably even killed in the time since Nathan saw him last, and this is what he thinks could be a sticking point? There's no way Nathan's own experience of their separation stands up as any sort of counterpoint with the orders of magnitude that separate them, but it was still seven long days spent grounded and helpless, bargaining with the powers of fate as he lay sleepless in bed every night. Wade could hold him responsible for every last detail; he could come home too furious or too terrified to ever speak to Nathan again and it wouldn't matter (or so he'd promised himself) just so long as he came home healthy and whole. The idea that Wade might have experienced a momentary lapse of faithfulness he'd never considered, not because it was unthinkable but because it never even ranked.

"It's alright, Wade," he manages, because he needs to reassure Wade without laughing in his face the very idea. "I get it. You're not leaving me for him, are you?"

"Hell naw!" Wade snuffles, nerves evaporating. Mostly.

"Eighteen months," Nathan agrees. "Must have been a lot of _tension_ to deal with in that time."

"Heh." And yet again, Wade's gone quiet in that horribly telling way. "I. Uh. I slept with Jenskot this one time too."

This one comes as a bigger surprise. "You... what?"

"She offered! And I was, y'know, curious!"

_Curious._ "How did that go?" asks Nathan carefully.

"Think I like boys better," says Wade, with so much feeling that Nathan has to chuckle.

"You know, I think I can live with that," he says, and tucks an arm around Wade's body to pull him closer. Wade certainly doesn't object.

"Say," he says after a bit, "you think they'd let us take a couple of those new shoulder-mounted railguns home with us when we leave?"

"You might not get them past immigration," says Nathan, if not without a certain wistfullness. "Some of the Avengers are waiting for us when we get back."

"You got the _Avengers?_ For me?"

"Well. Just a couple of their technical specialists to get the machine working again. The X-Men didn't have anyone with the right experience. I know people who know people."

Wade's moment of star-studded hero worship lasts not nearly long enough. "Okay, I got a plan. You mind-whammy them while I sneak the guns past."

"Wade, I'm not mind-whammying the Avengers. I already owe them a favour."

"C'mon, Nate, they're superheros! They get mind-whammied all the time!"

"And how does that usually work out for everyone?"

"Wuss."

"Missed you too Wade."

"Not like _I'm_ gonna miss my shoulder-mounted railgun."

In one quick movement, Nathan is kneeling over Wade and has both his hands pinned to the bed over his head. "I am sure," he promises, "I'll come up with some way to help you get over it."

_Filthy stinking cheat_ , Wade gripes, knowing Nathan will hear it, but there's no real protest in it at all.


	2. Epilogue

It's true that leaving Wade's side for more than a second had been unthinkable when they'd worn themselves out for the night, and it remains true for all of a couple of hours more before nature calls at a volume there is no sleeping through. Nathan clambers over Wade and pads his way down the hall in his socks, somewhat displeased to discover that half-awake is more than enough for the full absurdity of the trek from the holding cell to the bathroom and back to be inescapable.

The old familiarity of the bathroom is unsettling in a whole hoard of ways that had either been absent from the ready room or which he'd been too distracted to notice earlier. An old crack he'd watched wind its way slowly up the bathroom wall over the years has leapt ahead, sprung a two-pronged surprise attack and colonised the near edge of the ceiling since he was here last. At least he mostly manages to avoid speculation as to why they'd have replaced the sink while he'd been away, or how Wade might have been involved.

On his way back he runs into Aliya in the corridor, still dressed and looking very much awake despite the hour. "Late night watch shift?" he guesses.

"At this hour?" she says, with a look of surprise that quickly softens into amusement. "It's not even nine."

"Oh," says Nathan, embarrassed. "I thought... it's been a long day."

"Mm," she agrees, the laughter still very much there in her face, because really, there's no way everyone in the bunker doesn't know exactly what he and Wade have been up to, but there's no reason it would bother anyone. It's comfortable like that between them for the several seconds it takes for Nathan to remember that he's having this conversation with his former girlfriend, and then suddenly there's nothing very comfortable about it anymore. Now he has time to notice, she's changed in so many minute ways he'd overlooked in the rush of nostalgia that had blinded him on first sight of her and the others; all the tiny things you don't notice when you see someone every day have added up over his absence. She's taller for one, though with her in boots while he's barefoot it's hard to gauge precisely by how much; she's cut her hair recently, and there's a stiffness in the movement of her right arm – nothing anyone who didn't know her so well would notice, but it was never there before. The peculiarities of time travel have pushed them out of synch; while for him it's been only a handful of months, for her it's been more than two years, and here he is, glimpsing her future while he's muddled around still grasping for a proper hold on what passes for his own present. This is a part of her life he'd long ago accepted he would never get to see.

Whatever might have happened since, they'd been close not so very long ago and this may well be the last chance they'll ever have to talk alone; but they've said their goodbyes once already, and he doesn't know what else there's left to say. Circumstances have nothing to offer him; he was never supposed to come back here. That the Canaanites could follow him back at all is testament to the narrow window of opportunity that exists for him in the past, after his arrival but before he changes so much that the futures diverge completely. The more he influences the path of history, the less there'll be left here for him to recognise if he comes again, until there's no way back at all.

They'd known all that the day he left; it's hardly as though Wade is the boy he'd left her for. But he'd left, and he'd found Wade, and when he had come back it hadn't been for her.

"Thank you," he says at last, "for taking care of him."

"Don't thank me, Hope's the one who had to make him follow orders," Aliya says, shrugging the compliment away. "We didn't risk anything we couldn't afford to lose to get him back to you."

"Even so-"

"You know," Aliya cuts in, "I didn't understand at first what it was you saw in him." The sudden honesty in her voice is startling; she gives a faint, self-deprecating smile. "Well, he sure showed me, didn't he?" There's a horrible moment here where Nathan's sleep-addled brain is petrified by the thought this is about to segue into an anecdote about what Wade's like in bed before she clarifies, "We recognised your fingerprints all over his hand-to-hand technique straight away, but I never guessed how much potential he had before he started to realise it. I've never seen anyone find their feet in the firing line that fast."

The intonation of her voice and the whisper of her mind speak volumes more than she ever could out loud, the echo of old frustrations and trauma past, but it's gone again the next moment when she shakes it off and catches his eye with hers. "We didn't do you any favours, Dayspring. If he hadn't shown up, I might not be here today."

Nathan feels suddenly quite inexplicably short on oxygen. Since the minute he landed he's been dealing with the reality of what Wade's become in his absence; he's hardly begun to process the sledgehammer blow of all Wade had promised him mere hours ago. At the very least he should have reached the state where he'd be numb to any further weight, but to hear Aliya – Jenskot – adding her commendation hits him somewhere where he's still fragile and soft. It's all he can do to stammer, "That's not why I – I mean, he was the first other mutant I met back there, but... you have to understand I didn't approach him to recruit him, I fell for him."

Aliya folds her arms and tilts her head at him with a look that has over a decade's close association behind it. "Are you sure?" she asks, and for the first time since meeting Wade, he's suddenly very much not.

Had there been some part of him that had seen all this in Wade when they'd first begun getting close? He doesn't know and probably never will, but if there's any truth at all to what Aliya's implying, well, if nothing else it makes a mockery of the part of him that still wants to lock Wade up somewhere safe and quiet while he goes about fulfilling the destiny ahead of him.

"It's a relief, you know?" Aliya offers. "We can send you back knowing you won't be doing this alone."

"That's up to Wade," Nathan says, automatically, all previous discussion on that topic notwithstanding. "It shouldn't have had to be his fight; that's he's gone through this much for me already is more than he ever should have had to do."

A gentle squeeze to his shoulder prompts him to look up again.

"Nate," says Aliya, "Not everything in life starts and ends on the battlefield. It's enough to know you won't be the only one missing us when you go back."

That last bombshell delivered, she kisses him lightly on the cheek and is gone down the corridor, leaving Nathan to put his heart back together again in his own time.


End file.
